Massachusetts Steakhouses | SteakMap

The Best Steakhouses in Massachusetts

Massachusetts has 55 steakhouses across 32 cities and towns — Boston holds 14, Burlington 5, and the rest run out to Martha’s Vineyard, the outer Cape and the Berkshires. It is a compact state that rewards driving: there are good steaks in Edgartown, Provincetown, Pittsfield and Gardner, and none of them are the same idea.

It is also, improbably, where the American meat trade began.

The Massachusetts Ten

1. Abe & Louie’s (Back Bay) — the Boylston Street benchmark, and the room most Bostonians name first. The signature order is the bone-in filet mignon, which is not a cut most steakhouses bother to offer.
2. Mooo.... (Beacon Hill) — the most polished steakhouse in the city, set into a townhouse hotel on Beacon Street. There is a second room in the Seaport and a third out in Burlington.
3. The Stockyard (Brighton) — opened in 1971 by Cornelius “Neil” Manning and his wife Lillian, and built on the actual site of the Brighton stock yards at 135 Market Street. You can see it from the Mass Pike. The history below is the reason it matters.
4. Bogie’s Place (Downtown Crossing) — a tiny reservations-only steakhouse tucked behind a barroom, seating a couple of dozen people. The least likely good steak in Boston.
5. The Bancroft (Burlington) — the best reason to eat steak outside Route 128, built around a wood-fired grill.
6. Rare Steakhouse (Everett) — the casino steakhouse at Encore Boston Harbor, and the closest thing in New England to a Las Vegas room.
7. One Eleven Chop House (Worcester) — central Massachusetts’ best, and the anchor of the state’s second city.
8. Caminito Steakhouse (Northampton) — an Argentine steakhouse in the Pioneer Valley, which is not a sentence anyone expects to write about western Massachusetts. Chimichurri, short ribs, open fire.
9. 19 Prime Cast Iron Steakhouse (Edgartown) — steaks finished in cast iron on Martha’s Vineyard, where almost everything else on the menu is a fish.
10. The Chatham Cut (Chatham) — the Cape’s serious steak option, in a town that has every excuse not to have one.

America had its first meat auction in Boston, 123 years before Chicago opened a stockyard

Everyone knows the beef trade as a Chicago story. It started here.

In 1742, Brighton Market — then a village called Little Cambridge, a few miles west of Boston — held the first meat auction in the American colonies. In mid-1776, a father and son named Jonathan Winship I and II put out a call to the farmers of Middlesex County: slaughter your cattle and send the meat to Little Cambridge, to provision General Washington’s army. The Brighton Cattle Market was born out of a wartime supply problem, and the first stockyard was laid out beside the Bull’s Head Tavern, with pens on flat ground where a stream gave the animals water.

It stopped being a sideline very quickly. By the 1820s, Brighton was taking between two and eight thousand head of cattle every Monday. Between 1835 and 1845 the market averaged more than two million dollars a year in sales. In 1869 alone, 53,000 cattle, 144,000 hogs and 342,000 sheep passed through, and the town held more than forty slaughterhouses — the largest concentration in New England. The Brighton Abattoir went up in 1872; the cattle market moved in 1884 to thirty acres at North Beacon and Market Streets.

Here is the detail that reverses the usual picture: from those yards, cattle were loaded into Boston and Albany Railroad cars and shipped west. For over a century Boston was the center of the American meat trade, and Chicago only took the title when the Union Stock Yards opened in 1865 — a hundred and twenty-three years after that first Brighton auction. The abattoir finally closed in 1957.

Almost nothing is left. But The Stockyard still stands on Market Street, on the ground the pens occupied, serving the thing the neighborhood was built to move.

The Italian-American chophouse is a Massachusetts specialty

Look down the state roster and a pattern appears that does not show up anywhere else in this directory: a whole category of steakhouse that is equally a red-sauce restaurant. Prima in Charlestown, Pino up in Tyngsborough, Venetian Moon in Reading, Vorelli’s out in Provincetown, and Alba in Quincy with a sibling in Hanover.

Boston-founded Davio’s put the idea in its actual name — Northern Italian Steakhouse — and runs rooms in Braintree and Foxborough. It is a local group rather than a national one, which is why it sits here and not at the bottom of this page.

The Cape, the Islands and the Berkshires

On the Cape and Islands: 53 Chophouse in Mashpee, Atlantic Fish & Chop House as the second Edgartown option, and 71 West Atlantic in Plymouth on the way out.

Out west, Pittsfield carries two — Rare 297 and RJ’s — with Max’s Tavern in Springfield and Zeke’s almost on the Vermont line. Closer in, The Federal covers Waltham, Coach Grill Wayland, Post 1917 Lexington, Teresa’s Prime North Reading, and Mason’s Quincy.

The national chains

Boston is a convention and expense-account town, and the brands are here in force. Dependable, not distinctive: Ruth’s Chris runs four locations in the state, Smith & Wollensky three, and Boston adds Morton’s, The Palm, Mastro’s Ocean Club, Ocean Prime, STK and Eddie Merlot’s.

Browse the state by city: Boston, Burlington, Worcester and Edgartown.